LONDON, Feb 23: A Guantanamo prisoner who claims he was tortured at a covert CIA site in Morocco returned to Britain a free man on Monday after nearly seven years in US captivity -- the first inmate from the US prison camp freed since President Barack Obama took office.

Binyam Mohamed flew to a British military base and was released after being interviewed for four hours by police and immigration officials. He had to fill out new paperwork for residency since his permit expired in 2004.

Mohamed’s claims of torture, abuse and extraordinary rendition are at the heart of several lawsuits. Lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic are suing for secret documents they say prove the United States sent Mohamed to Morocco and that Britain knew of the mistreatment -- a violation under the 1994 UN Convention Against Torture.

“I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares,” Mohamed said in a statement released by his attorneys. “Before this ordeal, ‘torture’ was an abstract word to me. ... It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways all orchestrated by the United States government.”

He said he wasn’t yet “physically nor mentally capable of facing the media.”

His lawyers said they would provide money for his accommodations and living expenses.

Mohamed’s case could have far-reaching legal implications for the Obama administration and Britain, America’s closest partner during its war on terror.

US Attorney General Eric Holder is expected at the Guantanamo detention centre on Monday as the Obama administration weighs what is needed to shut the facility down.

“The friendship and assistance of the international community is vitally important as we work to close Guantanamo, and we greatly appreciate the efforts of the British government to work with us on the transfer of Binyam Mohammed,” Holder said in a statement.

Britain’s attorney general has opened an investigation into whether there was criminal wrongdoing on the part of Britain or a British security agent from MI5 who interrogated Mohamed in Pakistan, where he was arrested in 2002.

Two senior British judges, meanwhile, have reopened a case into whether 42 secret US intelligence documents shared with Britain should be made public.

Several other lawsuits are under way in the United States against a Boeing subsidiary that allegedly supplied planes for rendition flights to Morocco and for the disclosure of Bush-era legal memos on renditions and interrogation tactics.

The United States has refused to account for the 18 months Mohamed says he was in Morocco.

“I am so glad and so happy, more than words can express,” Mohamed’s sister, Zuhra Mohamed, said on Monday.

The 30-year-old Ethiopian refugee has few remaining links to Britain. His brother and sister live in the United States. His parents are said to be back in Ethiopia. And his British residency that he obtained when he was teenager has since expired.

Any revelations from the lawsuits could be particularly damaging for the British government, which unlike the Obama administration, doesn’t have its predecessors to blame.

“I assure you that we have done everything by the law,” Prime Minister Gordon Brown told reporters last week when faced with questions over Mohamed’s case.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said Britain has been asking for the return of former UK residents since 2007.

“We very much welcome President Obama’s commitment to close Guantanamo Bay, and I see today’s return of Binyam Mohamed as the first step toward that shared goal,” Miliband said.

Mohamed’s family came to London from Ethiopia in 1994. It applied for asylum following the ouster of Marxist dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam’s ouster, but the family was only given temporary residency.

Schooled in West London, Mohamed worked as a janitor and later became a student of electrical engineering before converting to Islam in 2001.

Shortly afterward, he said he went to Pakistan and Afghanistan to escape a bad circle of London friends and experience an Islamic society. But he was detained in Karachi in 2002 for using a false passport to return to Britain.

For three months, he says he was tortured by Pakistani agents, who hung him for a week by a leather strap around his wrists.—AP